Some Amazon sellers pay $ 10,000 a month to sneak up to the top of the marketplace

For millions of third-party sellers in Amazon's marketplace, maintaining a successful business is a constant struggle to rank in search results, collect positive product reviews, and keep up with Amazon when publishing its own branded versions of merchants most successful products. This intense competition has led to the emergence of a secret, lucrative black market, where agents peddle "black hat" services, sometimes achieved by bribing Amazon employees, allegedly benefiting market dealers over their rivals, according to BuzzFeed News documents. .

The most prominent black hat companies for American Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon's ranking system to market products, protect accounts from disciplinary action, and crush competitors. Sometimes, these black hat companies switch their corporate Amazon employees to leak information from the company's wiki pages and business reports, which they then resell to steep prices marketers. A black hat company charges as much as $ 1[ads1]0,000 a month to help Amazon sellers appear at the top of the product search results. Other tactics to promote seller's products include removing negative reviews from product pages and exploiting technical loopholes on Amazon's website to raise products & # 39; general sales rankings. These services make it harder for Amazon vendors who comply with the company's terms of success in the market, and sellers who rely on those tactics, mislead customers, and undermine confidence in Amazon products.

"To what extent merchants go to the gaming system, and the amount of resources they use to do so, [are] a testament to how Amazon's recommendation and ranking algorithms shape consumption," says Renee DiResta, research director at Cyber ​​Security New Knowledge, BuzzFeed News. "While Amazon reiterates that" yet another fake review is too many, "the fact that manipulative tactics from dishonest sellers make honest business owners afraid they can't remain competitive. And when the manipulation succeeds, it's the Amazon customers who are the victims. "

This black hat economy continues to escape the Amazon detection, despite the company's efforts to better combat fraud on the site. Though customers tend to rely on Amazon, the site has long been dealing with fraud in its marketplace, which includes secretly organized counterfeit reviews and few-rich schemes that scam sellers out of thousands of dollars. Some third-party Amazon vendors told BuzzFeed News that the use of black hat tactics has become so widespread that when a seller is banned for using these methods, another seller comes in doing the same in their place.

Amazon refused to comment on the specific black hat consulting firms mentioned in this story, but it told BuzzFeed News that these "bad actors make up a fraction of activity" on the site.

The rise of black hat consultants comes as Amazon's marketplace continues to become a more significant part of its retail business. Amazon's third-party vendors now make up 58% of total platform sales, of $ 160 billion, compared to $ 117 billion in sales of its own retail, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. But as the third-party market grows, it also makes the fierce competition among its millions of sellers worldwide.

Davide Nicolucci, founder and director of Amazon Marketing Consultant, Growth Hack, has criticized black hat tactics on Amazon. He told BuzzFeed News that the market has become so competitive and full of black manipulation that some sellers feel compelled to break the rules and use those tactics.

"Amazon is so slow in responding to issues, as Amazon solves your problem, you have lost so much money you can also make black hat," he said. "It's wild. It's a war."

While Amazon has made some efforts for police manipulation of its marketplace, the business of black hat consultants continues to thrive, largely hiding in a clear view. A simple search for YouTube for "super URL" brings up dozens of tutorials on how to manipulate Amazon's ranking system by writing some words into a product URL that tricks the algorithm to believe that real customers find a particular item through popular keyword searches and add It for their shopping carts and wish list. Amazon black hat consultants often speak to Amazon selling conferences and events, and some run their own private groups on Facebook, which is where most Amazon sellers connect with each other. For sellers, it can be easier to buy black hat services such as sending a message on Facebook or participating in an online webinar.

Such a site that promotes black hat services to Amazon sellers, AmzPandora, offers customers a menu of services that vary in price from $ 1 for a single thumb up to a product review to $ 10,000 to recover a suspended account, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The website AmzPandora.com disappeared after BuzzFeed News contacted the site's owner, a Chinese based consultant named John Zhu, who runs another black hat tactics website called ClockWorks.deepbrief.net. This site also went offline before publishing.

AmzPandora's services ranged from small tasks to more ambitious strategies to rank a product higher using Amazon's algorithm. While it was online, it offered to ping internal contacts on Amazon for $ 500 for information on why a seller's account had been suspended, as well as advice on how to appeal the suspension. For $ 300, the company promised to remove an unspecified number of negative reviews on a listing within three to seven days, which would help increase the overall star rating for a product. For $ 1.50, the company offered a service to trick the algorithm into believing that a product had been added to a shopper's cart or wish list by writing a super URL. And for $ 1200, an Amazon seller could buy a "frequently purchased" place on another marketplace product page that was to appear for two weeks, which AmzPandora promised would result in a 10% increase in sales. Amazon refused to specifically comment on AmzPandora and the services it offered to marketplace sellers.

Another service AmzPandora offered for $ 550, called "sales status removed check", would give sellers With suspended account information on why the suspension occurred, Zhu told BuzzFeed News in March over Skype. He said this service "currently not working", but his company sometimes pays Amazon Premium Account Manager around $ 2,500 to "help us check."

Zhu told BuzzFeed News that many of the services AmzPandora offered only to scrape publicly available data, such as customer emails and phone numbers, from Facebook and Google. He said his offer did not break Amazon's terms and that "this is what everyone else [does]." Zhu finally hanged on the call and refused to respond to several additional comments.

"The bad actors who offer these subordinate services and those who buy them show a blatant respect for society, our policies and, in some cases, the law and do not reflect the thriving community of honest entrepreneurs who make up most of ours. sellers, Amazon said in a statement, "We will continue to fight them, make it harder for them to hide, and work on law enforcement to hold them accountable by withholding funds and pursuing civil and criminal sanctions."

Although Zhu said that the business does not violate Rules, while recording an October ClockWorks seminar for clients obtained by BuzzFeed News, he admitted that he uses information collected from Amazon employees, and recommended participants to "stay low" and warned that they "don't want anything to leak out, so these tactics are no longer available."

During the seminar, Zhu said that he can draw an analysis of a product listing that comes directly from "internal" Amazon, which gives seller insight into their competitors. In a sample report, which Zhu showed in a PowerPoint presentation, he explained how Amazon's internal product's ranking system works and says it is based on repeated purchases, searches, and page views.

"I don't make this," he said during the seminar. "It's from Amazon internally."

Amazon told BuzzFeed News that it has "sophisticated systems to restrict and revise access to information" and that any employee who violates their ethical code may face discipline, dismissal, and possible legal and criminal penalties. It also said it is taking action against sellers who pay for internal information; Penalties include terminating their sales account, deleting reviews, holding back funds, and taking legal action. Amazon refused to comment on whether or not the information Zhu presented in the seminar is available only to internal employees or how it was achieved.

Zhus seminar constituted a two-hour pitch on the benefits and black hat tricks that a seller can access and employ with a "Cobra account" available through ClockWorks. During the conversation, Zhu took participants through the many steps to hijack an entry from their original owner. He explained how to manipulate the market to avoid the $ 150 fee to list a "Lightning Deal," and he advised on how sellers can capture coveted "Vine Voice" ratings on their products, which is a designation skier tends to to trust. He also detailed how sellers can sabotage their competitors by creating fake buyer accounts with black market cards to write negative reviews and "send [ing] flooded emails" to sellers over Amazon's messaging system with terms such as "counterfeit", "fired" corrupted " , "fake products" and "married." A PowerPoint slide in the presentation states that this can get the targeted account blocked or closed "safely. "Zhu also said in the seminar that through the" Cobra account "he offers his company, an Amazon seller can create an unattainable customer profile for writing reviews, as well as up-dated or down-rated reviews for their own products and competitors.

Amazon has hit the fight against fraud and illegal tactics in its marketplace over the past few years, which includes a December breakdown on employees taking bribes to leak customer information. But the marketplace is so scattered that attempts to fight bad actors add an ongoing game of whack-a-mole.

As recently as March 21, AmzPandora was promoting a service that offered to obtain the customer's email address for sellers, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Amazon forbids third-party sellers to access any of their customer's email addresses or phone numbers because it limits communication to Amazon's messaging system.

Amazon's terms for service providers explicitly prohibit "any attempt to manipulate sales distance". This includes accepting false orders, ordering own products, and paying buyers to purchase products. It also prohibits merchants from creating multiple merchant accounts, writing reviews on their own products, and simulating customer traffic to a product – all of which black hat companies like AmzPandora offer to customers.

Although black hats sell the service market is secret, there is a low barrier to entry for buyers. A website called Black Hat Tech – blackhattech.asinspy.net – allows interested sellers to order black hat services as easy as placing an order over WeChat. The company offers services such as "removing bad reviews" for 1500 Chinese yuan (around $ 223 in US dollars) and "manipulating reviews [and] manipulating the sales rank" for the cost of 41,000 Chinese yuan (about $ 6,100 in US dollars). The company denied comment on BuzzFeed News.

Amazon told BuzzFeed News it builds on layers of investigators, automated technology and machine learning technology to prevent and detect unauthorized scale scales, and to take action against the bad actors behind the abuse. The team also works with social media to stop unauthorized reviews cured in private groups, it said.

"Amazon is investing significant resources to protect the integrity of our store reviews because we know customers value the insights and experiences shared by other customers," Amazon said. "Even an unauthorized review is one for many. We have clear participation guidelines for both reviewers and merchant partners, and we suspend, prohibit and take action for those who violate our policies."

A black hat consultant, who asked to remain anonymous, told BuzzFeed News that he could have a suspended Amazon merchant account restored by pulling strictly with his employees' connections in the Amazon. He said he sometimes repaid these employees, who are based outside the United States, favorably with their US immigration papers. He charges $ 2,000 sellers to recover an account that was suspended for slow shipping or similar customer complaints. The consultant even has a solution for sellers who have sold fakes, which Amazon has taken a hard line against. Restoring an account suspended for alleged forgery can cost between $ 4,000 and $ 4,500.

The consultant said he knows this service is against the rules, but he sees third-party sellers like David turning out with the Amazon Goliath.

"It's not rare for me to be on the phone with an adult man crying because he has lost all his business, he said.

Another site, called Seller Mafia, is run by a Shenzhen-based consultant named Howard Thai who has labeled himself "Professor of Amazon." Its most expensive product is a plan called "stealth ranking system" that allows the seller's product to appear in query results when a customer on Amazon searches for competitive words on their product, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. For $ 2,000 laws, mafia sells three very competitive keywords for a client's product, which manipulates the keyword parameters in an Amazon URL to produce a product-keyword relationship. To do so, the company can write an Amazon URL that contains the client's product and keywords, and then get bots or paid workers click on the link. This tells the algorithm that people searching for "protein powder", as an example, click on the client's product. Thai refused to confirm that the company offers this service, but the seller has it on a list of services offered to clients. At SellerMafia.com, a seller can also buy another $ 1000 stealth seller account that allows them to use another account if their first account is "off a competitor", Thai told BuzzFeed News.

For just $ 5, the seller mafia will "brush" an account, which is when a product page is removed by all the information except their reviews and listed with a new product, which is against Amazon's marketplace rules. This allows a seller to inherit a positive star rating and high ranking for a product without selling anything. So a shopper can see a four-star product like a jade roll, but the listing has past lives as a garage paper and a stool to earn the average four-star rating. The trick capitalizes on consumers who don't always roll through each review, and may miss a product listing once for a completely different item.

In an outdated marketing video on merchant mafia available to logged in clients, BuzzFeed News is a Shenzhen-based seller named Kevin Zhang said his product shot up the Amazon ranks to become one of the top 10 products in the category after he had consulted with Thai.

"Before we used the brush system, we never thought we could rank in the Amazon top 10," he said in the video. "At the moment we are number nine, and it still goes up." Amazon refused to comment on the seller's services directly.

Some sellers who use black hat tactics say they are reluctant to do so, but do not know how else to keep up with their competitors. A salesman using Howard Thai's service pack at SellerMafia.com and asked to remain anonymous, BuzzFeed News told him he had used different versions of black hat techniques since 2014, when the Amazon marketplace was flooded with dirty sales tactics. It was around when he said he noticed that people are using Amazon's messaging system to send e-mails to customers offering free products in exchange for reviews and learned about offices full of people in Bangladesh, paid for writing fake reviews .

"Everyone does," said. "People must survive so of course they should do it … They are like," Why the hell do I spend money on ads, and I'm not on page one? ""

The seller said that without a sales force, he would barely break the sale because the cost of advertising on Amazon is so high. He said he spends around 30% of sales on advertising. He currently accounts for about $ 3 million this year in net profits, but before using Thai services, he made $ 73,000 a year.

"They disturb me," he said of sellers who rely on black hat tactics on Amazon. "You always want to do things the right way."

Thailand's service pack extends beyond the site. He also arranges classes where he charges salesmen $ 10,000 to learn black-hat techniques for "educational purposes," he told BuzzFeed News. At a recent two-day seminar in New York City, about 30 people gathered in a small conference room at the Renaissance Hotel in Times Square to learn Thai.

Thai told BuzzFeed News that the seminars do not teach sellers how to cheat. He said he only teaches "what people are doing out there in China."

"We not only do blacks – we do a lot of white," he added. This means that he also teaches selling tips that do not violate the Amazon rules.

But in a free webinar on March 28, Thai asked an upcoming training in Shenzhen, China, and emphasized the unsatisfactory character of his services. He promised that "the most controversial secrets throughout the Amazon will be handed over to you on a silver platter" and "splurge on the exact strategies that hacked Chinese sellers to massive success on the Amazon time and time again." Though he had not offered any specifications on his course, Thai ensured that participants "would receive unlimited amounts of competitive intelligence to your competitors, so you could eradicate them."

Chris McCabe, a former Amazon market researcher who now runs a senior sales consulting firm, ecommerceChris.com, told BuzzFeed News that black hat consultants and merchants manipulating their sales promotions and attempting to undermine other sellers are experts in evading Amazon management groups despite for the company's work to track them.

"Targeted merchants must use ever-defensive tactics through the brand register and report to political teams to counter abuses, which are away from brand development and sales growth

" They are always going to figure it out, he said. "Whatever the machine does, it's a man to manipulate it." ●